Author on Tes: Improving your planning

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Damian and Kevin aka DigitalTeacherPlanner talk about the experiences that led them to create their digital teacher planner and how it can help you with your planning.

Tell us about your professional background

We’re both ex-teachers and have over 20 years combined experience in business studies, economics, enterprise, ICT and physical education at secondary school level. We’ve held various middle management roles, such as head of department, second in department and head of year.

Why did you decide to become a collaborative author pair?

We loved our jobs, we love teaching, but events in both of our lives (medical and family bereavement) prompted our respective career changes. Then we ‘bumped’ in to each other on LinkedIn and DigitalTeacherPlanner.com was born.

We discussed various memories from school, even lesson planning, and agreed that the process would have benefitted from some sort of electronic system. In addition, our planning folders were bulky, and we couldn’t navigate from plan to plan efficiently.

Lesson planning took up far too much time because there wasn't a simple process we could easily follow, keeping everything neatly organised. Our Digital Teacher Planner is what’s come out of our experiences and thinking.

Tell us about the digital planner and how it might help teachers

We’re passionate about making teachers’ lives easier and hope that our Digital Teacher Planner will help to simplify and improve the efficiency of your planning time, reduce paper workload and enable you to spend more time with the people that really matter... family, friends and students.

The Digital Teacher Planner is a fully interactive PDF document with tons of embedded tabs, sections, internal links and external hyperlinks to aid its navigation. It features a home page with a personal information section and a guide on how to use it, a handy tab with useful advice and information (to help with lesson planning, assessment and differentiation), two calendar views, thirteen monthly views, numerous weekly and daily views… as well as pages for contacts, expenses and notes.

‘Calendar View’: displays entire calendar year with each month linked to the respective…

‘Monthly View’: features major holiday & religious events, links to previous / next month in the top corners as well as links to every…

‘Weekly View’: displays week number, link back to monthly view, major holiday & religious events, space to record the groups you are teaching during the week, handy notes section & links to each and every…

‘Daily View’: features links to every week number of the month (current week highlighted), link back to monthly view & handy ‘Notes’ / ‘Phone Calls’ / ‘To Do’ sections. In addition, the left page of each Mon-Fri view contains ‘Today’s Lessons’ where you can plan your lesson activities / ideas and the right view contains ‘Today’s Overview’ where you can record your plans before & after school, break / lunch time duties or indeed any detentions that you might have!

If you are interested in purchasing the full Digital Teacher Planner please click the link above!